The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is coming out next month and here are our first impressions. Wizards of the Coast is set to release a new version of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Dungeons & Dragons in November. EN World had the chance to delve into the new book early, thanks to a review copy provided by Wizards of the Coast. We’ll have an in-depth review in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, here are some of our biggest takeaways after reading through the new core rulebook.
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide Is Made With an Eye Towards Newer Players
My immediate reaction when reading through the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide is that it makes no assumptions about the skill level of its readers. While the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide opened with a chapter on world building, the new Dungeon Master’s Guide focuses on explaining all the things that a DM does during a typical session of D&D. There’s also sections on how to handle disruptive players, and reminding DMs that they can show as much or as little leniency to their players as they’d like. The little tips scattered throughout the book read like a mix of common sense advice and things that most DMs learn over time as they get more comfortable with their style of play.
It’s not that the new 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide doesn’t contain material useful for veteran DMs, but Wizards clearly positioned this book to serve as the starting point for would-be DMs. Everything from the generic maps to the handy little campaign organization charts is meant to help players with their first campaigns. If you’re an experienced DM, you may find a lot in the new 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide to be superfluous. However, I would hand this book to anyone wanting to learn how to be a DM, which is not something I would say about the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide.
A Well-Organized Dungeon Master’s Guide Makes a Big Difference
The 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide receives a lot of flak from D&D commentators for a number of reasons, but it’s biggest sin was poor organization. Important tools like encounter-building were buried in random chapters and the overall coherency of the book was a mess. This largely was because the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide approached being a DM from the perspective of building a campaign world and then figuring out how to run a game inside of it. This mirrors one of the biggest mistakes a DM can make – that DMs should be more concerned about world building than actually running a game their players would like.
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide takes a completely opposite approach. The first chapter is titled “The Basics” and delves into the fundamental rules a DM needs to understand about Dungeons & Dragons. From there, it expands into encounters (covering social, exploration-based, and combat) and then standalone adventures, and finally a full campaign. All of the random useful bits scattered throughout the previous DMG is now put into one chapter called “DM’s Toolbox” and organized alphabetically.
Honestly, the re-organization of the Dungeon Master’s Guide is probably its biggest strength. It makes the book feel less like a meandering ramble and more like an actual guidebook. Big kudos to the editing team for fixing one of the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide’s worst flaws.
Bastions Are Simple But Solid
The Bastions system is the shiny new toy in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and fills a couple of major holes in D&D 5th Edition play. It fills that time-honored fantasy of building a base with tangible benefits and also provides a much needed money sink for players to spend all their gold on. The actual Bastions system is pretty simple – at 5th Level, players can create a bastion with two special facilities inside. Each special facility has a mechanical benefit that is activated by spending a Bastion Action on a Bastion turn. A typical Bastion turn is supposed to cover a week’s worth of adventuring time, although there’s some leeway depending on how much downtime a player has and how long it’s been since their last Bastion turn. At four level intervals, players can add additional facilities and some facilities are only available at higher levels.
Other third-party publishers have covered similar ground to Bastions, but I feel like they often get too complicated when compared to other 5th edition subsystems. For example, Strongholds & Followers by MCDM was an entire rulebook of stronghold management and related systems. I enjoyed its approach but it felt like a poor mesh with how the rest of 5E worked. A lot of these systems are akin to having a $30 cocktail to go along with a meal at a diner – they work great on their own but aren’t necessarily the right fit for this particular system.
Meanwhile, the Bastions system feels like a 5E system, even if it’s a little more fleshed-out than others we’ve seen. There’s a bit more than 20 pages dedicated to Bastions, which is more than I think any other non-combat system has ever gotten in a Wizards-produced 5E rulebook. I hope that Wizards continues to build out Bastions over the course of the next few years, adding new facilities and features to what seems like a promising new system.
Greyhawk Returns to D&D But as a Generic Campaign Setting
Greyhawk was one of the first Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings and was filled with a mix of warring kingdoms, regional conflicts, and magical secrets to discover. Outside of republished materials, we haven’t seen any “new” Greyhawk material in over 20 years. Wizards of the Coast has brought back Greyhawk as an example campaign setting, with 30 pages detailing the world of Greyhawk and its people.
I’m not a massive Greyhawk fan largely because there hasn’t been much material made for it since I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. However, the Dungeon Master’s Guide states that most of the material was pulled from the 1980 World of Greyhawk guide and I don’t see much in the gazetteer that really contradicts what I know about the setting.
Personally, I don’t think this will lead to a resurgence of Greyhawk as a preeminent D&D world. The world is used as an example of a generic setting and there’s nothing really unique about that world in the book unless you recognize some of the iconic locations from early D&D adventures. Still, I’m glad that a new generation of fans get to see Greyhawk and I’m always happy when Wizards of the Coast ventures beyond the Forgotten Realms.
Magic Items Improved
It would be silly not to talk about magic items when discussing the Dungeon Master’s Guide, especially as that chapter takes up nearly a third of the book. Like a lot of other parts of 5E play, the magic items got rebalanced and revised with the 2024 Core Rulebooks. While I could give you a list of spells I wanted to see fixed in 5E before the Player’s Handbook, I couldn’t say the same about magic items. That’s in part because the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide (and subsequent talk about it by designers) weirdly implied that magic items were somehow an optional part of D&D. To be blunt, there are a lot of weird misconceptions about how to handle magic items in D&D and the new Dungeon Master’s Guide does its best to clear this up. One of the handy campaign trackers is literally a chart showing you how many magic items to give out per tier of play, which is about as ringing of an endorsement about the distribution of magic items in a campaign as you can find.
I’ll leave it to other experts to tell you what the most broken magic items are in this book, but I do like that certain generic elements like “Flame Tongue” can be assigned to any type of weapon. I also like that there’s a coherent guide to crafting magic items, with players required to have proficiency in Arcana, specific type of tools, and put in specific amounts of time and cost based on magic item rarity. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it’s better than what we had before.
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